Origins

Sculpture Garden for Chelsea Flower Show 1982 by Ben Jakobsen; image The Museum of English Rural Life, Jakobsen Collection  ref AR JAK DO1/40

Speaker - Andrew Wilson

I have always found it fascinating that garden design and landscape architecture rely on the same history as embodied in Jellicoe’s The Landscape of Man. It is only in the C20 that these two professions drifted apart.

The Landscape Institute was originally a new professional body of landscape designers or landscape architects and garden designers, sometimes embodied in the same designer. But, as the profession moved towards WWII and especially afterwards, the need for landscape design in the public sector outstripped the need for private garden design and certainly proved a more lucrative draw for many as their practices grew.

Garden design as a profession clung on to the post war wreckage and eventually emerged as a distinct profession, establishing a new organisation – the Society of Garden Designers. As a past Chairman of what is now the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers and as a Fellow of the Landscape Institute, I aim to chart this evolution with a foot firmly in both camps.

Andrew Wilson is an award winning garden designer who originally trained as a landscape architect. He started teaching garden design in 1984 becoming Director of Garden Design Studies and Vice Principal at the Inchbald School of Design from 1989 – 2003. He was External Examiner for several garden design degree programmes and taught post graduate landscape architecture at the University of Greenwich, and at Birmingham City University with Kathryn Moore. He was one of the founders of the London College of Garden Design in 2008. He still practices as a consultant to the McWilliam Studio, having worked with Gavin McWilliam since 2008. Andrew is also a writer and the founding editor of the Garden Design Journal.